Tag Archives: affordable housing

What they didn’t talk about

debate2

The Democratic presidential candidates had a fair amount to say last night about the disappearing middle class, but not about where all of those fallen people can afford to live. Housing unaffordability is a “crisis” throughout the country, judging from news accounts, but it was not among the “pressing issues” deemed worthy of discussion in the debate.

One likely reason is that “pressing issues” for the purpose of this debate were defined, in part, by the volume of traffic they generate on Facebook. Perhaps housing advocates need to devote themselves more devoutly to social media.

Another reason, as we’ve suggested in previous posts, is that any substantial solution to the affordability problem will require major federal investments, in the form of subsidies, public housing and so forth. To be sure, raising wages – as the candidates pledged to do – will help alleviate the problem, but even a minimum wage of $15 will leave millions of people house-poor.

Here’s an idea that might have been introduced during the debate’s back-and-forths about capitalism, but wasn’t: Housing, like education and health care, is basic human need that requires major governmental intervention and that can’t simply be left to market forces. Don’t take our word for it –check out what an establishmentarian magazine, The Economist, has to say about housing as one of capitalism’s unmet challenges.

Another housing topic the candidates bypassed was the pronounced racial segregation that still marks residential settlement patterns in metropolitan areas all over the country, 47 years after the passage of a Fair Housing Act that was intended to undo that segregation.

They had opportunities to discuss this, when they were invited to talk about “issues of race in America” or the unrest in Baltimore, but the focus remained on reforming the criminal justice system, improving educational opportunities, and so forth. Not that these aren’t important, but there’s another perspective on the events of Baltimore and Ferguson that deserves attention. Consider this analysis by the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, published soon after the Baltimore riots:

“Whenever young black men riot in response to police brutality or murder, as they have done in Baltimore this week, we’re tempted to think we can address the problem by improving police quality—training officers not to use excessive force, implementing community policing, encouraging police to be more sensitive, prohibiting racial profiling, and so on. These are all good, necessary, and important things to do. But such proposals ignore the obvious reality that the protests are not really (or primarily) about policing.

“Baltimore, not at all uniquely, has experienced a century of public policy designed, consciously so, to segregate and impoverish its black population. A legacy of these policies is the rioting we have seen  ….Whether after the 1967 wave of riots that led to the Kerner Commission report, after the 1992 Los Angeles riot that followed the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King, or after the recent wave of confrontations and vandalism following police killings of black men, community leaders typically say, properly, that violence isn’t the answer and that after peace is restored, we can deal with the underlying problems. We never do so.

“Certainly, African American citizens of Baltimore were provoked by aggressive, hostile, even murderous policing, but … (w)ithout suburban integration, something barely on today’s public policy agenda, ghetto conditions will persist, giving rise to aggressive policing and the riots that inevitably ensue. Like Ferguson before it, Baltimore will not be the last such conflagration the nation needlessly experiences.”

Signs of desperation

desparation

The housing affordability problem, which sometimes seems intractable in the current political climate, is generating some novel ideas around the country – would-be solutions and would-be explanations, among them:

  • A school district in the San Francisco Bay area is contemplating building housing for teachers who otherwise can’t afford to live there. Imagine that: A school board going into the development business just so it can hold on to the faculty.
  • NIMBYism apparently pervades wealthier suburbs outlying Chicago, which have less than their share of tax-credit supported low-income housing, according to a regional analysis. Advocates of “affordable housing” admit that the term itself can draw discriminatory, responses and that they might have more success if they called it something else. But alas, resistance to inclusiveness is more than a public relations problem.
  • Further signs of desperation in California: One county is considering a tax on Airbnb to help fund affordable housing development. Another is contemplating rent control. And a renters’ federation is complaining that the Sierra Club (the Sierra Club!) is standing in the way of needed housing density.
  • Denver’s housing crisis has been exacerbated by marijuana legalization, or so some surmise. That seems like a stretch, but the argument goes like this: (a) Legalization has pulled in a surfeit of millennials, driving up rents. (b) Growers are snapping up old industrial areas and driving out the artists who inhabit them. Mercifully, artists seem to have other options in Colorado.

Variations on a sordid theme

“Forty families on one lot, using one water faucet. Living in barren one room huts, they were deprived of the glory of sunshine in the daytime, and were so poor they could not even at night use the electricity that is to be generated by our great river…

“I found one family that might almost be called typical. Living within one dreary room, where no single window let in the beneficent sunlight, and where not even the smallest vagrant breeze brought them relief in the hot summer – here they slept, here they cooked and ate, here they washed themselves in a leaky tin tub after carrying the water for 100 yards. Here they brought up their children ill-nourished and amid sordid surroundings…”

The speaker was Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, in his home district of Austin, describing the “slum tarnish” he observed during a Christmas Day walk through town. He made his remarks in a radio address to his constituents (this was well before LBJ himself got into the radio business), hoping to win their support for something new in town: public housing. The address became known as his “Tarnish” speech.

Here’s a photo (albeit not from Texas) that seems to capture what he was talking about:

slumscene

 

 

 

 

 

Thirty years before he orchestrated the passage of the Fair Housing Act as president, Johnson – whose ambition as a young congressman is captured by this 1937 photo of him shortly after his election, with FDR in Galveston – prevailed in that housing campaign.

lbj1938B

The first public housing in the country built under the 1937 housing act was in Austin. It was segregated, like most public housing that sprang up around the country over the next few decades, but less sordid than what they replaced. LBJ used that word – sordid – to good effect at HUD’s inauguration, when he declared: “Our cities and our new urban age must not be symbols of a sordid society.”

“Sordid” might be an apt description for some blocks of big-city, high-rise public housing, thoroughly segregated, underfunded and bereft of hope, if not sunlight. High rises came into planners’ favor in the ‘40s, but a couple of decades later they were not. For a tidy history of public housing, click here.

Some argue that public housing outside the big inner cities has worked quite well, and perhaps that can be said for places like Vermont, which apparently got into public housing fairly late in the game. (Burlington’s housing authority dates from 1961, and the state’s, from 1968.) If a history of Vermont’s public housing hasn’t been written, it’s a thesis topic in waiting.

Housing opinions get short shrift in D.C.

questionnaire

You may have missed it, but the MacArthur Foundation, by way of Hart Research Associates, did a national poll of 1,401 adults last spring on housing issues – the third such survey since the Great Recession. Guess what: A majority thought the housing crisis isn’t over yet!

No surprise there, given that 60 percent said they regard housing affordability as a “serious problem,” and 55 percent said they’d made at least one sacrifice (e.g. taking second job, eating more junk food, etc.) to cover their housing costs.

We’ll spare you the responses to the questions on class mobility and Millennial stresses, and simply highlight a couple of disconnects:

  • Respondents appeared divided about what role, if any, the federal government has in addressing the housing-affordability problem. Fifty-three percent said it wasn’t the federal government’s responsibility, compared to 39 percent who thought the federal government should be involved.

And yet, a big majority – 75 percent – said they want elected leaders in Washington to make housing affordability a priority. (See? We’re not alone in saying stuff like this, or this.) And 79 percent said they wanted state and local elected leaders to do so.

  • But those elected leaders – national, state and local – are not making affordable housing enough of a priority, at least in respondents’ eyes, as suggested by this chart:

Maca$

Dare we suggest a reason why public officials are not responding? Because they have a sense of impunity, inasmuch as making affordable housing a high priority would, in all likelihood, require spending appreciable amounts of tax dollars. How would the poll’s respondents feel about that?

More housing-crisis dispatches

Another of our occasional samplers on the unaffordability epidemic:

  • As Seattle wrestles with housing unaffordability, an op-ed in the local paper recommends looking to Berlin!

berlin2

Germany’s largest city, newly flooded by young people and immigrants, has a population of 85 percent renters and has introduced a new form of rent control — the “rental price brake,” which seeks to rein in rent increases. (Median rents have gone up 50 percent in six years, by one account.) And government has imposed other constraints – on renovations (can’t be too fancy without approval) and on conversion to vacation homes. Well, that may sound promising, but to what effect? Protesters are in the streets, we learn in the Wall Street Journal, as “Berlin’s Housing Problems Boil Over.”

Unicode

  • In Edina, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, 96 percent of the housing stock is unaffordable to a family of four earning $43,000 annually. So, the City Council is considering a form of inclusionary zoning with a buy-out provision. New developments would have to include 10 percent affordable units, or that requirement could be waived if the developer pays $220,000 per unit into a city fund to support affordable housing. Now, that’s not a new idea, but the buy-out figure looks rather high (Burlington’s is $100,000 per unit), and of course, there’s the concern that any new housing developed by the city not lump all the lower-income people together in their own blighted enclave.
  • In Columbus, Ohio’s Franklin County, more than 24,000 people applied for Section 8 vouchers from an agency that is prepared to give out … 200, followed by 70 a month. That’s in a county where 13,000 vouchers are in use.
  • In Miami, old people camped out overnight just so they could file applications to live in an affordable senior housing complex.
  • In Portland, Ore., the newly declared “housing emergency” is expected to last at least a year.
  • And in Palo Alto – we know, we know, this is Silicon Valley and expected to be unaffordable beyond  imagining – a local man and college graduate who earns a “decent salary” is living with his parents because he can’t afford an apartment. He graduated from Palo Alto High 20 years ago, so he’s too old to be a Millennial! Here’s what he told the City Council about himself and his cohorts:

“All of us went to great colleges, great grad schools, and not one of us can live in the city.”

 

So much for artists’ affordable housing

When Burlington’s mayor announced that he would not support housing in the South End’s Enterprise Zone, he won cheers from artists who feared gentrification. While the mayor’s isn’t necessarily the last word in “Plan BTV South End,” the product of extensive public input (or so the city proudly insists), it does stack the odds against any kind of housing in the zone.

Too bad. One of the more intriguing prospects raised in the draft plan was to create work/live spaces – aka, affordable housing – for artists. Could that be done deftly in some of those South End warehouses without gussying up the surrounding neighborhood and driving up rents for everyone else? Maybe, maybe not, but it seems a shame not to consider this. A blanket ban on housing seems to foreclose the possibility.

southend

Well, it’s a possibility that’s being embraced elsewhere, all around the country – in little towns and big cities, both. “Colorado’s affordable artist housing efforts catching on quickly,” read a headline in Saturday’s Denver Post. Artspace, out of Minneapolis, has been developing work/live artists’ lofts for more than 20 years – but apparently none yet in New England.

If Burlington’s artists aren’t interested, perhaps their counterparts in other warehouse-rich Vermont towns might be. Bellows Falls, Springfield, Rutland, Brattleboro, among many others? Here’s the view in Colorado, according to the Post article:

“The hope is that some rural projects will have the added advantage of preserving historic structures in need of attention. That makes Trinidad, with its excess of significant, and underused, buildings, a good candidate for the pilot program…”

Check out what’s been done in Fergus Falls, Minn. (pop. 13,300)…

fergus

or  Hastings, Minn. (22,400).

hastings

If you’re looking for an example of a dreary warehouse transformed, look at Council Bluffs, Iowa …

council bluffs

or even Memphis – which is fashioning an arts district around its project.

memphsis

Now, it may be that some of projects, the affordable housing notwithstanding, have contributed to surrounding gentrification. But if so, did it have to be that way? Municipal planners take note.

 

 

Burlington’s unaffordability update

Yesterday was the due date for Burlington’s CAPER – that is, the Consolidated Annual Performance & Evaluation Report that the city has to file with HUD every year as a condition of receiving Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) and HOME funds. (HOME is a federal program that supports the rehabilitation, acquisition and construction of rental housing.)

burlingtonapt

If you want to know more about the allocation of these funds, which amount to several million dollars, and about the beneficiaries, you can go to the report, which covers July 1, 2014 to June 30 , 2015. Here, we’re just going to refer to  three graphics that apply to housing.

The first two may look familiar to you. They’re in Appendix A, Pages 53 and 54. Rental vacancy rates in Chittenden County have been exceedingly low for at least two decades, as shown on the first graph, and still are. That’s one reason rents are as high as they are.

The vacancy rate here here is typically below 2 percent. That’s below  the “Balanced rate” of 4 percent supposedly the threshold for a healthy rental market, and its well below the rates for the Northeast and the U.S.

As for the housing wage – that is, the amount a person has to earn to be able to afford to rent an dwelling of average cost — well, no big surprises here, either. The graph on Page 25 shows four pillars, left to right, represent the costs of renting apartments: efficiency, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom. As you can see, a minimum-wage worker is out of luck, as is a median-wage worker who wants anything bigger than an efficiency.

By definition, you can “afford” an apartment if you spend no more than 30 percent of your income on housing. For context: According to the 2015 edition of “Out of Reach,” put out by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Vermont’s two-bedroom-apartment housing wage is $20.68 an hour, and the average wage for renters is $11.78.

OK, so how did Burlington fare for the year in its affordable housing program? It came up short, as you can see in the following table:

CR-20 – Affordable Housing 91.520(b)

Evaluation of the jurisdiction’s progress in providing affordable housing, including the number and types of families served, the number of extremely low-income, low-income, moderate-income, and middle-income persons served.

 

  One-Year Goal Actual
Number of Homeless households to be provided affordable housing units  

15

 

0

Number of Non-Homeless households to be provided affordable housing units  

76

 

46

Number of Special-Needs households to be provided affordable housing units  

0

 

0

Total 91 46

 

  One-Year Goal Actual
Number of households supported through Rental Assistance  

0

 

0

Number of households supported through The Production of New Units  

25

 

28

Number of households supported through Rehab of Existing Units  

6

 

6

Number of households supported through Acquisition of Existing Units  

60

 

12

Total 91 46

Granted, a single year is a rather arbitrary term to judge and overall program, given that affordable units might well be coming on line before or after. Such is the case here, the report notes, with the prospect of the Bright Street Co-op. You can read the city’s account of its affordable housing program on Pages 24-26, where the reader is assured that:

“Ensuring the availability of a continuum of housing, for all residents of Burlington, continues to be a top priority for the City.”

 

Plotting neighborhoods, top and bottom

To your library of testimonials on the growing income inequality, you can add this one from the Urban Institute, a study titled “Worlds Apart: Inequality between America’s Most and Least Affluent Neighborhoods,” that shows disparities increasing from 1990 to 2010. This paper uses a composite index (income, educational attainment, home ownership rates, median house value) to identify neighborhoods in the top 10 percent and bottom 10 percent.

You can see them plotted on an interactive national map. Here’s 2010  (blue is “top,” grey “bottom”):

citylab

If you scroll to the Northeast you can check out Vermont’s evolution – interesting, but not particularly dramatic.

As is the case with most such national surveys that focus on metropolitan areas, this one analyzes “commuting zones.” In Vermont’s case, that’s a designation of questionable applicability, because it means a zone centered on Burlington with a population of 321,946, more than half the state’s total.

In an appendix, the study lists dozens of commuting zones, each with its “inequality index,” and Burlington comes out OK – somewhere in the middle. Ditto Burlington’s growth of income disparity over 20 years.

Although there has been some shifting of the top and bottom zones across the country, the wealthy zones have remained fairly impregnable. One reason for that, as this analysis of the Urban Institute data emphasizes, is that discriminatory housing policies, such as exclusionary zoning (e.g., large lot sizes) that preserve richer residential enclaves. Multi-family rental housing, affordable or not, is typically missing from these neighborhoods altogether.

Of course, discriminatory land use policies aren’t the sole culprit. High land prices are an obvious deterrent for affordable housing development. Then again, discriminatory policies in many cases may have contributed to the higher prices … a vicious circle.

 

Fascinating notes from all over

A Monday potpourri that panders to our friends with short attention spans:

starbucks

  • Starbucks, which offers tuition-assistance to its U.S. employees, offers rental assistance to its workers in the U.K. After a year’s employment, they can get a no-interest loan for a rental deposit.

downsize

  • The U.K., never short of fresh approaches to chronic social problems, offers this one for the housing affordability shortage: oldsters downsizing to free up their unused extra space for youngsters. Worthy of debate, no?
  • Vermont’s recurrent lament that it’s getting too old and can’t hang on to its youth prompts the question: Where are the youth going? Well, here’s one answer, in the form of a list of cities where Millennials are buying homes in large numbers. They’re mostly out west (Des Moines! Grand Rapids!), the same territory where young Vermonters fled during the 1830s. Back then, the people they left behind wrung their hands about that exodus, too.

dubai

  • Maybe some of the fleeing youth are heading to Dubai, but if they are, they’re encountering – ta-dah! –– an affordable housing shortage, complete with 30-mile commutes from the suburbs.

 

Something to cheer in Woodstock

The opening of Safford Commons in Woodstock earlier this week has been widely and deservedly celebrated. This 28-unit development was about a decade in the making – a decade marked by legal battles and neighborhood opposition. You can get some of that history from a Valley News story on the ground breaking a year ago, and a you can get an thumbnail idea of where things stand now from accounts on Vermont Digger and on VPR, source of this photo:

saffordvpr

Let’s throw a little context around this. Woodstock is an employment center, with more than 2,100 jobs in more than 270 establishments last year, according to the Vermont Department of Labor. By that measure alone, Woodstock would seem to be a prime candidate for workforce housing – that is, housing that working people can afford to live in.

Woodstock is also a relatively wealthy town, with an estimated median income of about $99,600, compared to Vermont’s average of $68,100, according to Vermont Housing Data. A smaller share of its total housing units are rented (23.5 percent) than Vermont’s average (25.9 percent), and those residents who do rent in Woodstock tend to be slightly better off than their average Vermont counterparts. Just 29 percent of Woodstock’s renters are housing-cost “burdened” (that is, they pay 30 percent of their income on housing), compared to Vermont’s average of 52 percent; and just 14 percent are “severely burdened” (they pay 50 percent or more), compared to Vermont’s average of 26 percent.

All of which suggests that many of the lower-wage employees who work in Woodstock don’t live there and have to commute from some place else.

Until Safford Commons opened, however, Woodstock had only two subsidized housing complexes (Melishwood I & II), with a total of 26 units (11 of them for elderly residents). The addition of a third affordable rental complex in Woodstock is not only welcome, it’s overdue. Here’s hoping it won’t be the last.